The world – the Western and Islamic
worlds that is – has a most unhealthy and irrational obsession with Zionism, the Jewish people, and the Jewish state. An ocean of ink has been spilled over the past hundred years
– and terabytes of cyberspace filled up these days – on the existential
conflict between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs.In fact the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict claims a far larger share of the world’s
attention than it deserves. Geopolitically it’s not that important; “a
20th century problem surrounded by 21st century chaos,” in the words of one diplomat. Indeed, the fate
of Israel and the Palestinians is far less important to the geostrategic
interests of the United States than events elsewhere in the Middle East, East
Asia, and beyond. Former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer is right when he asks “can it be proven that it would make a substantive –
vice emotional – difference to U.S. security if . . . every Palestinian killed
every Israeli, or vice versa . . . ?” The “brutal but correct” answer says
Scheuer is that it doesn’t. Ethno-religious communal conflicts, like that
between Israel and the Palestinians, “evoke sympathy and stir emotion,” but
none of them, “regardless of who wins, endanger U.S. interests.”

Ah, but there’s the rub. While Scheuer
overstates his case – Israel, as General David Petraeus points out, does have strategic value as a
stable nation with an advanced economy and a powerful military that shares
American cultural and political values in a part of the world that is
increasingly unstable and dysfunctional – the American people do have
a considerable historical and emotional investment
in Israel.Ever since the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, Americans have seen themselves as the “New Israel.”“Come, let us declare in Zion the work of the Lord our God,” proclaimed the Pilgrim leader William Bradford, quoting the prophet Jeremiah.Adherents of the Calvinist faith, and this includes Puritans and Jacksonians, gave their children Hebrew names (Abraham, Samuel, David, Jeremiah, Abigail, Rachel, Esther, Sarah, Dina, etc., etc.,) and bestowed upon the New World such biblical place names as Shiloh, Bethel, Bethlehem, Jericho, and New Canaan. Preachers and pamphleteers portrayed the American Revolution as a reenactment of the biblical Exodus: the Continental Army became the “army of Israel” under the command of the providentially chosen George Washington, the Moses who led the thirteen colonies out of bondage to “Pharaoh” George III, through the wilderness of war, to the promised land of independence. The Reverend Abiel Abbot announced in a 1799 sermon: “It has often been remarked that the people of the United States come nearer to a parallel with Ancient Israel, than any other nation upon the globe. Hence Our American Israel is a term frequently used; and common consent allows it apt and proper.”

Early Americans were among the first Zionists. In 1819 John Adams wrote to the Jewish American writer and politician Mordecai Manuel Noah: “Farther I could find it in my heart to wish that you had been at the head of a hundred thousand Israelites . . . & marching with them into Judea & making a conquest of that country & restoring your nation to the dominion of it. For I really wish the Jews again in Judea an independent nation.”Jacksonians tend to identify with Israel, ancient and modern. Nineteenth-century Jacksonians saw themselves as Israelites engaged in the holy work of winning the land from the Native American Canaanites. While fighting the Seminoles in Florida in 1818, Andrew Jackson declared that his soldiers were “like the Iseralites of old in the wilderness.” Jackson believed his army acted as “the hand of heaven . . . pointed against the exciters of this war,” on a mission to scatter the enemy “over the whole face of the Earth.” Present-day Jacksonians admire Israeli strength and resolve and view the Jewish state as a valuable ally in the war against radical Islam. They also see Israel as a valiant David that shares American values, surrounded by a sea of Arab Muslim Goliaths whose social, cultural, and political mores leave Jacksonians baffled, whose states and societies are in meltdown, and whose embrace of jihadist terrorism places them beyond the pale of civilization and renders them enemies of the United States.Israel is the source of the Abrahamic
faiths that claim the loyalty of at least half of mankind. Though small in
number as a people the contributions of the Jews to world civilization is
immense. (Though, as Yuval Noah Harari points out, Judaism as a religion has had a very minor impact on civilization, other than as the source of the ethical monotheism universalized by Christianity and Islam.) And so the historical and emotional importance of Israel and the Jews
to America and the world guarantee that Israel’s actions and destiny will remain
at the center of the world’s stage. (See, for example the current issue of Foreign Affairs, cover shown below.)

Of course when it comes to Israel and the Jews it’s
just not possible for most observers to be fair and
balanced, or engage in calm, reasoned discourse. Israel and the Jews push too
many hot buttons for too many people – religious, historical, cultural,
psychological, and political – for Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. Friends
and foes of Israel, living in alternate realities, committed with passionate intensity to uncompromising positions, engage
in take-no-prisoners ideological jousts that inevitably devolve into incoherent paroxysms of righteous anger and rage.
(And yes, most of the anger and rage against Israel, these days largely on the Left, isdriven by anti-Semitism. Walter Russell Mead calls this new incarnation of Jew-hatred the “Israel Outrage Industry.” See: Helen Thomas.) There is simply too much historical and emotional baggage for all involved.

I certainly make no claim to “objectivity.”
As an American, a Jew, and a Jacksonian, my sympathies are with Israel and her
people. I believe wholeheartedly in Zionism, the rebirth of Israel, its
language, culture, and historical heritage as a modern Jewish nation in its
ancient homeland. A nation that works to realize its commitment to democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and the highest
moral aspirations of Judaism, however imperfectly, in the most trying of
circumstances.

The creation of Israel in 1948 is
condemned by Arabs and Muslims as a catastrophe (nakba) that displaced
between 400,000 and 750,000 Arab Palestinians (estimates vary; a larger number of Mizrahi Jews were expelled from Muslim countries – a Jewish nakba), and overturned the natural order of
the world where Muslims rule and infidels submit. Political scientist Ian
Lustick writes that for Arabs and Muslims,
Israel’s “very creation and existence, constitute an unbearable
injustice.” He questions “whether Israel, as a Jewish country, can be
stomached by the vast Arab and Muslim majorities of the Middle East.” Hatred
of the “Zionist entity” among Arab Muslims is so intense,
Lustick warns, that it may be politically and psychologically impossible for
them to see any future for Israel “other than the fate of the
Crusaders.” That Israel is a successful, prosperous, dynamic modern society while contemporary Arab societies are
catastrophic failures, only deepens the Arab sense of shame and humiliation and
intensifies the Arab commitment to eliminate the “Zionist
entity” as the only way to redeem honor and attain justice. (Update: All this may be in the process of changing at the state level. The Iranian and ISIS threats have led to a tentative thaw between Israel and the Sunni Arab states. However Arab societies and the Arab street remain virulently anti-Semitic.)

Arab Palestinians are an integral part of the broader Arab nation. The Arabs who live on both sides of the Jordan are the same people with the same culture, language, and mix of ethnic and religious sects. Indeed the
same can be said for the entire Levant or “Greater Syria” (Bilad ash-Sham, a claim frequently asserted by the late Hafez al-Assad). Testifying before Britain’s Peel Commission in 1937, Awni Bey Abd al-Hadi, leader of the Arab nationalist Istiqlal Party, asserted:

There
is no such country as Palestine. “Palestine” is a term the Zionists invented.
There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of
Syria. “Palestine” is alien to us. It is the Zionists who introduced it.

Zuheir Moshen, one-time leader of the as-Sa’iqa
faction of PLO, declared in 1977 that there
never was a separate Palestinian nation. “In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese.” In 2015, PA President Mahmoud Abbas stated that Palestinians and Jordanians are “one people living in two states.” A Jordanian government minister agreed with Abbas, saying that “Jordan and Palestine are one body with one spirit.” In other words, Jordan is Palestine. The existence of a distinct Arab Palestinian people was put forth solely as a weapon to fight Zionism.Far from dating back to “time immemorial,”
today’s Palestinian Arab population descends in large part from immigrants who
arrived between the 1830s and 1947. During the first twenty years of the British
mandate (1919-1938) some 419,000 Arabs migrated to Palestine. In those
same years they were joined by 343,000 Jews. In the words of Evelyn Gordon, “both
Palestinians and Jews comprise small indigenous populations augmented by
massive immigration in the 19th and 20th centuries.”

Take for instance Rana Baker, a Gaza-born blogger at The Electronic Intifada, graduate of SOAS, University of London, and Ph.D. student at Columbia University, who declares that resistance to “settler-colonialism” justifies violence targeted at Israeli civilians, including the cold-blooded murder of Israeli teenagers. Bakerwrites that her family, of Syrian and Turkish origin, came to Palestine in the early twentieth century. The extended family of Palestinian
diplomat and professional liarSaeb Erekat, despite his insistence that they lived in
Jericho for 5,500 years before Joshua ben Nun arrived, are one of seven
clans of the Howeitat tribal confederation that migrated to Palestine around 1860 from the Howeitat
district of northwestern Arabia. Likewise the four main clans of the village of Umm el-Fahm traced their origins to Ottoman-era migrants from Syria, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia. Other clans, attracted by the economic opportunities created by Zionism, came to the village from Egypt and Transjordan during the British mandate. The Baker and Erekat families, like the clans of Umm el-Fahm, were
following the same path as Sheikh ‘Izz al-Dīn al-Qassām, the charismatic
Islamist preacher, fidai (guerrilla), and inspiration for Hamas, who died leading
a jihad against the Jews and the British in 1935. Qassām was born in northern
Syria and migrated to Palestine in 1920 at age thirty-eight. One of the great heroes and “martyrs” of the Palestinian resistance, “the first Palestinian fidai” as Joseph Massad calls him, was not really a Palestinian at all.

Well, as no less a figure than Fathi Hammad, the Hamas minister of the interior and national security, explains:

Allah
be praised, we all have Arab roots, and every Palestinian, in Gaza and
throughout Palestine, can prove his Arab roots – whether from Saudi Arabia,
from Yemen, or anywhere. We have blood ties. So where is your affection and
mercy?

[...]

Personally,
half my family is Egyptian. We are all like that. More than 30 families in the
Gaza Strip are called Al-Masri [“Egyptian”]. Brothers, half of the Palestinians
are Egyptians and the other half are Saudis.

Who are
the Palestinians? We have many families called Al-Masri, whose roots are
Egyptian. Egyptian! They may be from Alexandria, from Cairo, from Dumietta,
from the North, from Aswan, from Upper Egypt. We are Egyptians. We are Arabs.
We are Muslims. We are a part of you.

Hammad adds that Palestine is “the spearhead for Islam” and the tip of the Jihad. The idea, or the myth, of a Palestinian Arab nation as distinct from the larger Arab Muslim nation began to develop in the 1920s, but did not fully emerge until the 1960s. Historian and blogger Michael Lumish gets it just right: “I do not see where the Jewish people are under any obligation (moral, legal, or otherwise) to recognize a people who only recently constituted themselves as a people for the sole purpose of opposing the creation and maintenance of our small home.” Not every Arab tribe that calls itself a nation has the right to its own failed state. There are enough tribes with flags in the Middle East already.

Nonetheless, for reasons of both realpolitik and the
hope for reconciliation between two peoples dealt a hard hand by history, I was
in favor of Israel trying to accommodate Palestinian aspirations in a two-state
solution during the Oslo period of the 1990s. At that time I believed it was possible
for the Palestinians to achieve self-determination while allowing the people of
Israel to live in peace alongside their Palestinian neighbors.

A second intifada, three rejected offers
of statehood, three wars with Hamas and Hezbollah later, and the sight of
Palestinians dancing in celebration on 9/11, have changed my mind. Self-determination for
Palestinians can only be conditional on their willingness to live in
peace with the Jewish people and the Jewish state. So far the Palestinians have
shown that they are not ready to do this. Indeed, by insisting on
a “right of return,” by continuing to engage in and support
terrorism, by saturating their society with an unending stream of anti-Semitic hatred through their media and education system, and demanding that any future state be Judenrein,
the Palestinians have shown that they are still committed to Israel’s
destruction. “Israel is prepared to give up land,” Charles Krauthammer writes, “but never again without peace. A final peace. Which is
exactly what every Palestinian leader from Haj Amin al-Husseini to Yasser
Arafat to Mahmoud Abbas has refused to accept.” Krauthammer adds that
“territorial disputes are solvable; existential conflicts are not.” And
Shlomo Avineri writes: “The truth is that in the Palestinian narrative, the Jews
are neither a people nor a nation, but merely a religious community; therefore
they aren’t entitled to a state.” Yossi Kuperwasser lists five fundamental principles on which the Palestinians reject a
Jewish state, principles shared by much of the Israel Outrage Industry:

There is no Jewish people.
Judaism is a religion, not a national group, and therefore the Jews have no
right to self-determination.

The Jews never had sovereignty
in the Land of Israel, and therefore there is no justification for their claim
to a Jewish state here – as a result, the disappearance of the State of Israel
is inevitable.

The Jews are faulty beings,
which is why the Europeans sought to be rid of them – there is therefore no
justification for the Palestinians, who have owned the land for ages and are
the descendants of the Canaanites, having to actually suffer
being in their vicinity.

All means that will expedite
the disappearance of Israel are legitimate, including armed struggle, popular
uprising and diplomatic activities. Methods that promise the greatest
achievements at the least possible cost are always to be preferred. Currently,
the focus must be on the diplomatic and legal campaign and on a popular
uprising (including the use of force without live weaponry).

The Palestinians are victims of
Israel and the West, and therefore those parties have no right to demand that
the Palestinians accept responsibility for their deeds or criticism over their
course of action.

David P. Goldman (a.k.a. Spengler) observes that “the Palestinians are not an
oppressed people, but rather the irreconcilable remnants of a once-victorious
but now defeated empire, living in an irredentist dream world in which a new
Salahuddin will drive the new Crusaders into the sea.” In hindsight it
is clear that the Oslo Accords were a disastrous strategic blunder from which Israel is struggling to recover. To quote the Wall
Street Journal’s Bret Stephens: “I’m not against a two-state solution,
if the other state is Canada. Do we think Israel should be party to the birth
of the 23rd Arab state, another Iran hard on its borders?” A Palestinian
state in Judah, Samaria, and Gaza with no limits on its sovereignty is
geopolitically infeasible if not impossible. So conclude the strategic analysts at Stratfor.
Martin Sherman argues that a fully sovereign Palestinian state, a state that
would not be demilitarized, would violate Israel’s minimum security requirements. “Why,” Sherman asks, “would the world accept another
state that is misogynist and homophobic? Jews must realize that between the
River and the Sea there will be either Jewish or Muslim sovereignty.” There
is simply no room for two sovereign states west of the Jordan River. This hard
reality is not often discussed or acknowledged.The bottom line is that the two-state solution is dead because a majority of Palestinians don’t want and never did want any of the realistic versions of statehood with restricted sovereignty that have been or can be offered. The two-state solution envisioned by the Palestinians would be, to quote Mark Levin, the “final solution” for Israel. Anne-Marie Slaughter, former State Department deputy to Hillary Clinton and now president of the New America Foundation, insists that Israel’s leaders, “by ignoring Palestinian dreams, are courting a nightmare.” Ms. Slaughter, trapped in the dead-end logic and false religion of the Middle East peace process, has it all wrong. It is the fulfillment of the Palestinian dream – the destruction of the Jewish state and the genocide of the Jewish people – that would be the true nightmare.“I’m not going to change my narrative,” Saeb Erekat declares. “When you say accept Israel as a Jewish state it means you’re asking me to change my narrative.” Yes Saeb, if you are serious about peace you will have to change your narrative, which is less than truthful about Jewish and Arab history. The Palestinians need a serious attitude adjustment on the reality of Jewish nationhood. Strategic analyst and historian Michael Mandelbaum agrees. “Peace,” writes Mandelbaum, “requires a fundamental change of attitude on the part of the Palestinians, nothing less.”

Progressive anti-Zionists refuse to
acknowledge that there are no secular democratic states in the Arab world where the rights of
ethnic and religious minorities receive any protection, let alone treat them as equal citizens.
This includes the Palestinians who have been indoctrinated
by both Hamas and Fatah into an Islamo-Nazi culture of hate, where
militants call the killing of Jews and harvesting their skulls “an act
of worship,” and young girls recite poems declaring Jews to be monkeys and
pigs “condemned to humiliation and hardship.” Journalist David Shipler and researcher Daniel Polisar both found that Palestinian attitudes have become more implacably antisemitic in the twenty years since the Oslo Accords; that “there is less – if any – daylight between individual Palestinians’ expressed opinions and the official line of the Palestinian leadership.”Mahmoud Abbas and other
Palestinian leaders are now trapped in this culture of hate they helped create. Indeed, Abbas
continues to foment hatred of Jews by spreading the blood libel that Jews seek to defile the Al Aqsa Mosque “with
their filthy feet.” Speaking before the European Parliament just two days ago, Abbas revived another ancient blood libel, accusing the Jews of poisoning Palestinian wells. More disturbing was the standing ovation Abbas received from the assembled European representatives. Former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky told The Times of
Israel’s David Horovitz that “if Abbas were to say, ‘We can accept
the fact that Jews will live here,’ he would be killed.” Edward Said at
least was more honest than his postcolonialist disciples in acknowledging the
uncertain future of a Jewish minority in an Arab Muslim majority state. “I
worry about that,” Said toldHaaretz’s
Ari Shavit in 2000. “It worries me a great deal. The question of what is
going be the fate of the Jews is very difficult for me. I really
don’t know.”

Joseph Spoerl points out that anti-Zionist advocates of a
binational “secular democratic” Palestine, “systematically whitewash
Palestinian political culture by denying, ignoring, or obscuring its Islamic,
Islamist, and antisemitic aspects. Their goal is to distract their readers from
the illiberal, undemocratic aspects of Palestinian society so as to keep the
focus relentlessly on the real or imagined sins of Israel.” They also promote
what Martin Kramer calls “the myth of Palestinian
exceptionalism.” Palestinian political culture, the Israel Outrage Industry
insists, is unique in the Arab world in its commitment to democracy, equality,
tolerance, non-violence, and respect for diverse points of view. This certainly
would make the Palestinians the exception to the Arab Muslim norm. But as
Kramer says it is a myth, a “triumph of image over substance.” Palestinian
historian Ahmad Samih Khalidi admitted as much in 1996:

No matter what image the
Palestinians have of themselves—in particular the carefully cultivated self-
image of the large and vociferous Palestinian intelligentsia—the truth is that
Palestinian society in its basic structure and orientation is fundamentally no
different from the Arab societies that surround it. Even a fervent belief in
the justice and morality of the Palestinian cause should not blind us to the
realities of Palestinian social and political conditions and to the fact that
the kind of regime that will initially emerge from these conditions will in
many ways replicate other regimes that have sprung from similar conditions.

Palestinian society, Khalidi added, was “still
dominated by traditional rural modes of action and behavior, still motivated by
local differences and tribal rivalries, and still marked by conflicts of class
and clan.” Neither Palestinian Arab nor any other Arab Muslim society had any
experience with or commitment to secular democratic norms. So it was no
surprise that the Palestinian Authority of Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas
would become a typically corrupt Middle Eastern autocracy. To have expected
otherwise, Khalidi concluded, was “either naïve or ill informed.”

The Palestinian vision was
never — as described by various Palestinian spokesmen in the 1960s, 1970s and
1980s to Western journalists — of a “secular, democratic Palestine” (though it
certainly sounded more palatable than, say, the “destruction of Israel,” which
was the goal it was meant to paper over or camouﬂage). Indeed, “a secular
democratic Palestine” had never been the goal of Fatah or the so-called
moderate groups that dominated the PLO between the 1960s and the 2006 elections
that brought Hamas to power. . . .

And today, again, and for the
same reasons – the phrase retains its good, multicultural, liberal ring – “a
secular, democratic Palestine” is bandied about by Palestinian one-state
supporters. And a few one-statists, indeed, may sincerely believe in and desire
such a denouement. But given the realities of Palestinian politics and
behaviour, the phrase objectively serves merely as camouflage for the goal of a
Muslim Arab-dominated polity to replace Israel. And, as in the past, the goal
of “a secular democratic Palestine” is not the platform or policy of any major
Palestinian political institution or party.

Indeed, the idea of a “secular
democratic Palestine” is as much a nonstarter today as it was three decades
ago. It is a nonstarter primarily because the Palestinian Arabs, like the
world’s other Muslim Arab communities, are deeply religious and have no respect
for democratic values and no tradition of democratic governance.

A reader commenting on an article about the Electronic
Initifada’s Ali Abunimah on the Jewish Daily Forward website
suggests that his vision for the Jews is the same as that of the Tsarist minister Konstantin Pobedonostsev: “One-third will die out, one-third will
leave the country, and one-third will be completely dissolved in the
surrounding population.” Perhaps this is what anti-Zionist activists Omar Barghouti and Max Blumenthal mean when they say that Jewish colonialists must be
“indigenized.” So behind their talk of human rights and fancy academic jargon,
what Barghouti, Blumenthal, and Abunimah (and the Ayatollah Khamenei) are saying is that those Jews
allowed to remain in the new Palestine, those whose skulls have not been harvested by Hamas, will be granted the traditional status of dhimmis, second-class subjects or worse in an
Arab Muslim state.

“Palestine is our land and the Jews are
our dogs!” the rallying cry of the Nebi Musa rioters in 1920 is still the defining
sentiment of Palestinian nationalism, the Arab street, and radical Islam. Anti-Zionist protesters from Jerusalem to
San Francisco have shouted it out as recently as 2009. Likewise demonstrators throughout the Arab world chant“Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews, the army of Muhammad will return.” Indeed Muhammad’s defeat and extermination of the Jews at the Battle of Khaybar is frequently celebrated and reenacted in Arab popular culture. Postcolonial theory, the dominant ideology of the academic Left, has nothing relevant to say about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It
was not Jewish immigration and settlement per se that provoked Arab Muslim anger,
writes historian Yaacov Lozowick, “but the Jewish attempt to change the rules
by ceasing to be subordinate dhimmis
and to strive for a national home. The Palestinians rejected Jewish aspirations
not because they were European colonialists and foreign invaders, but because they
were familiar, second-class locals who had suddenly dared to overturn the
natural order.” This natural order was vividly described by H. E. Wilkie Young, British vice consul in Mosul in 1909, who witnessed firsthand just how the subordination of Jewish and Christian dhimmis was enforced in a traditional Arab Muslim-majority society:

The
attitude of the Moslems towards the Christians and Jews, to whom as stated above,
they are in a majority of ten to one, is that of a master towards slaves whom
he treats with a certain lordly tolerance so long as they keep their place. Any
sign of pretension to equality is promptly repressed. It is often noticed in
the street that almost any Christian submissively makes way even for a Moslem
child. Only a few days ago the writer saw two respectable-looking, middle-aged Jews
walking in a garden. A small Moslem boy, who could not have been more than
eight years old, passed by and, as he did so, picked up a large stone and threw
it at them—and then another—with the utmost nonchalance, just as a small boy
elsewhere might aim at a dog or bird. The Jews stooped and avoided the aim,
which was a good one, but made no further protest.

Please note how the Muslim child in Young’s report treated the adult Jews as his dogs by throwing stones at them.

Young’s story illustrates how the history
of the Mizrahi Jews, the Arabic- and Persian-speaking Jews of the dar al-Islam, turns the postcolonialist
paradigm on its head. In the words of Lyn Julius, it places “the colonial boot
on the Arab foot.” Indeed, the Arabs were among the most successfulcolonizers and imperialists in world history. Arab conquerors, filled with zeal for their
new religion of Islam, swept out of Arabia in the seventh century, imposing
their language and their faith on the largely Aramaic-speaking Christian and
Jewish communities of the Middle East. The achievement of postcolonialist godfather and con-man Edward Said was to convince liberal progressive opinion makers that Arab Muslim conquerors and imperialists were the downtrodden victims of European – and Jewish! – imperialism.For most of the Middle Ages some 75 percent of the world’s Jews lived in Iraq, Iran and other Islamic lands. There were two sides to the
Jewish experience in the Muslim world. On the one hand Mizrahi Jews flourished
for long periods under the various caliphates, creating an economically and
culturally dynamic urban civilization. The key to Mizrahi Jewish prosperity under Islam was tolerance. Amy Chua (yes, before she became the notorious “Tiger Mom,” she was a serious scholar of empires in history) writes that tolerance – relative tolerance – was the defining characteristic of all of history’s great civilizational empires. Tolerance, as Chua defines it, “means letting very different kinds of people live, work, and prosper in your society – even if only for instrumental and strategic reasons.” Chua adds that tolerance refers“to the degree of freedom with which individuals or groups of different ethnic, religious, racial, linguistic, or other backgrounds are permitted to coexist, participate, and rise in society.”Tolerance, Chua notes, does not necessarily mean respect for subject peoples by an empire’s dominant group. An empire’s rulers can make use of its subject people’s talents while still holding them in contempt. This was the other side of the Jewish experience as dhimmis, the legal term for subject peoples under Islam.

Under the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates,
Islam was a vibrant, relatively
tolerant, intellectually dynamic civilization, whose great capitals of Baghdad,
Damascus, Cairo, and Córdoba were multiethnic, multi-religious metropolises,
centers of creative cultural discourse between Muslims, Jews, and Christians.
In Muslim Spain, called al-Andalus (Andalusia)
by Muslims and ha-Sefarad by Jews,
the period from the eighth to the eleventh centuries witnessed a renaissance of
Jewish life and culture and its synthesis with Islamo-Arab culture. Indeed the
great Umayyad Caliph of Córdoba, Abd ar-Rahman III (r. 912-961), chose Hasdai ibn Shaprut, the leader of Andalusia’s Jewish community, to be his vizier.Dhimmi status and payment of the jizya (poll tax) provided certain legal protections and a degree of self-government for Jews in the dar al-Islam that they lacked in medieval Christendom.

But this protection came at the price of social subordination and political impotence. Muslim tolerance toward religious minorities has been greatly exaggerated. For all of their economic and
cultural achievements, Mizrahi Jews (along with Christians) were still dhimmis, the colonized subjects of an
Arab Muslim imperium, subjected to a regime of degradation and humiliation,
forbidden to look their masters in the eye as equals. As Michael Lumish writes: “For thirteen centuries Jews lived under the jack-boot of Arab-Muslim supremacy. . . . In some places we were not even allowed to go out in the rain lest Jewish filth wash onto, and thereby contaminate, the clean Muslim streets. And now the West is telling us that Jews are being mean to Arabs.”The Qur’an (Surah 9:29) calls upon all Muslims to “fight against those who believe not in Allah... and those who acknowledge not the religion of truth (Islam) among the people of the Scripture (Jews and Christians) until they pay the jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves brought low.” The very visible economic and social success of the Mizrahi Jews provoked anti-Semitic backlashes. Periods of peaceful
coexistence and prosperity were frequently punctured by pogroms and persecution to make sure that Jews were “brought low.” This would be
increasingly the case after the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century
destroyed the urban civilization of the Middle East, and the Islamic world
began its long decline to its current state of civilizational failure.

Jews at the Western Wall in Jerusalem by Felix Bonfils, 1870s. Wikipedia.

Describing the Jews of Morocco in the 1780s, the Italian Jewish traveler Samuel Romanelli exclaimed:

Lord
God! Oppressed, miserable creatures that they are! They have neither the mouth
to answer an Arab, nor the cheek to raise their head. When an Arab tells one of
them to bend down so that he might strike him, the fellow bends and lets
himself be hit, not even daring to look them in the face lest they should say that
he cursed them in his heart.

Twenty years later the Catalan explorer Domènech Badia i Leblich, who wrote under the pseudonym“Ali Bey al-Abbasi,” noted that“The Jews in Morocco are in the most abject state of slavery.” In the 1830s the pioneer British Orientalist Edward Lane wrote that the Jews of Cairo were “held in the utmost contempt and abhorrence by Muslims in general.” Western travelers in nineteenth-century Palestine, decades before the first Zionist settlements,
described the state of degradation and humiliation endured by Jews in their
ancient homeland. Here is the French author François-René de Chateaubriand’s account of the oppression of the Jews of Jerusalem in 1806:

The
particular objects of every species of degradation, these people bow their
heads without murmuring; they endure every kind of insult without demanding
justice; they sink beneath repeated blows without sighing; if their head be
required, they present it to the scymetar. . . . Enter the abodes of these
people, you will find them, amidst the most abject wretchedness. . .

The American explorer John Lloyd Stephens, who visited the Holy Land while Andrew Jackson was in the White House, gave this chilling account of a massacre of the Jews of Hebron by the invading Egyptian army of Ibrahim Pasha in 1834:

I
cannot leave this place, however, without a word or two more. I had spent a
long evening with my Jewish friends. The old rabbi talked to me of their
prospects and condition, and told me how he had left his country in Europe many
years before, and come with his wife and children to lay their bones in the
Holy Land. He was now eighty years old; and for thirty years, he said, he had
lived with the sword suspended over his head; had been reviled, buffeted, and
spit upon; and, though sometimes enjoying a respite from persecution, he never
knew at what moment the bloodhounds might not be let loose upon him; that,
since the country had been wrested from the sultan by the Pacha of Egypt, they
had been comparatively safe and tranquil; though some idea may be formed of
this comparative security from the fact that, during the revolution two years
before, when Ibrahim Pacha, after having been pent up several months in
Jerusalem, burst out like a roaring lion, the first place upon which his wrath
descended was the unhappy Hebron; and while their guilty brethren were
sometimes spared, the unhappy Jews, never offending but always suffering,
received the full weight of Arab vengeance. Their houses were ransacked and
plundered; their gold and silver, and all things valuable, carried away; and
their wives and daughters violated before their eyes by a brutal soldiery.

As Stephens’s account makes clear, the
Jews of Hebron, even before the massacre by the Egyptians, were despised by
their Arab neighbors who treated them as social pariahs whom they could abuse
with impunity. In 1852 the Anglican clergyman Arthur George Harpur Hollingsworth found the situation of the Jews in Palestine unchanged: “This Jewish population is
poor beyond any adequate word; it is degraded in its social and political
condition, to a state of misery, so great, that it possesses no rights.” Even
if Jews had any wealth, which they didn’t, they would have to hide it, “because
to display riches would secure robbery from the Mahometan population, the
Turkish officials, or the Bedouin Arab.” Despised by Arabs and Turks “as an
execrated race,” hated by them “as the literal descendants of the original
possessors of the country,” it was only “by the assistance of a great power
like England, that a Jew, desiring to obtain security, liberty, and justice in
Palestine, can secure his rights.” Finally, the founding father of the Left himself, Karl Marx, drawing on the reports of the French diplomat César Famin, wrote aboutMuslim oppression of the Jews of Jerusalem in the April 15, 1854 issue of the New York Tribune:

[T]he
sedentary population of Jerusalem numbers about 15,500 souls, of whom 4,000 are
Mussulmans and 8,000 Jews. The Mussulmans, forming about a fourth part of the
whole, and consisting of Turks, Arabs, and Moors, are, of course, the masters
in every respect, as they are in no way affected by the weakness of their
Government at Constantinople. Nothing equals the misery and the sufferings of
the Jews at Jerusalem, inhabiting the most filthy quarter of the town, called hareth-el-yahoud, in the quarter of dirt
between the Zion and the Moriah, where their synagogues are situated—the
constant objects of Mussulman oppression and intolerance, insulted by the
Greeks, persecuted by the Latins, and living only upon the scanty alms
transmitted by their European brethren.

For the Left’s supreme icon to expose the myth of Muslim tolerance and report that Jews were a majority in Jerusalem decades before the first Zionist settlements is a major embarrassment for left-wing anti-Zionists.

This was what it meant to be a dhimmi in pre-Zionist Arab Muslim Palestine. This is what would mean to be “indigenized” in a post-Zionist Arab Muslim Palestine. This was the condition that the State of
Israel was created to redress. This is the condition to which Jews would return
in a “secular democratic” (i.e. Arab-Islamic) Palestinian state.

The Israel Outrage Industry repeats ad nauseam that before the rise of Zionism, Muslims and Jews lived together in peace, harmony, and mutual respect. These examples all show that the alleged Muslim tolerance of Jews was greatly exaggerated. Naïve liberal Jews, like J-Street’s Marcia Freedman, should keep this in mind when calling for Jews to give up political sovereignty and live once again as a “protected minority”– as dhimmis– in an Arab Muslim Palestine.

Historian
Georges Bensoussan finds that by the nineteenth century most Mizrahi Jews
lived in a state of misery and fear, which was alleviated only by the presence of the European colonial powers, culminating in the mass expulsion – the
ethnic cleansing – of Jews from the Arab lands after 1948 and their flight to Israel. And Israel, unlike the Arab world, welcomed and assimilated the flood of refugees that came to its shores. Zionism, which began as a nationalist movement by European Jews, liberated and empowered the Mizrahi Jews, enabling them to be masters of their destiny and actors on the political stage. Albert Memmi, the Tunisian-born Mizrahi author of The Colonizer and the Colonized, rendered this verdict on how the traditional Arab contempt for Jewish dhimmis, what historian Richard Landes calls the honor-shame dynamic in Arab political culture, shapes the conflict with Israel:

The
attitude of the Arabs towards us seems to me to be hardly different from what
it has always been. The Arabs in the past merely tolerated the existence of
Jewish minorities, no more. They have not yet recovered from the shock of
seeing their former underlings raise up their heads, attempting even to gain
their national independence! They know of only one rejoinder: off with their
heads!

This, Middle East analyst Raymond Ibrahim agrees,
is the true cause of Arab Muslim hatred of Israel. Far from being brought low, “Israel—the dhimmi that got
away—actually has authority and power over Muslims. Now, if dhimmis are
supposed to be kept in total submission to Muslims, how then when one of them
actually lords over Muslims? Hence Islam’s immense and existential rage against
the Jewish state.” A rage made more intense by the collapse of Arab Islamic civilization and the refusal of the Arab
peoples to take any responsibility for their civilization’s failure.

Relic of a lost golden age. The Great Mosque of Cordoba, Andalusia, Spain. Wikimedia.

And the hard truth is that Islam, as
currently configured in its Arab heartland, is a failed civilization: angry, intolerant, intellectually and economically stagnant, smothered by the iron hand of autocracy, torn apart by tribal and sectarian violence, sexually repressed,
consumed by fear and hatred of women; the dar al-Islam in the 21st century is a social, political, and cultural wasteland where liberty dare
not show her face. Ashamed of their pitiful condition, Islamic jihadists and
terrorists lash out in fury at the successful, prosperous, free societies of
the infidels, while they rape, enslave, genitally mutilate, and burn women alive. The Arab Spring’s dream of liberation has descended into a nightmare. The millions of refugees fleeing the Arab world are, in Sohrab Ahmari’s words, “rendering their own judgment about the state of Arab civilization”; or, as Ari Shavit put it, “Millions are voting with their feet against the colossal failure of the national Arab project that failed to produce a single state combining prosperity and freedom.”Muslims are fascinated with jidhadist violence, writes Arif Jamal, because of “their victimhood syndrome. Jihadism teaches them that the failures of Muslims as individuals and as an ummah (community) are caused by the infidels, who must be fought against, as Islamic scriptures order them.”

Looking out upon the ruins of the Arab
world, mourning its tragic decline from the glory days of the Umayyads and the Abbasids,
the distinguished Lebanese journalist Hisham Melhem admits with clear-eyed and
brutal honesty that “Arab civilization, such as we knew it, is all but gone. .
. . Every hope of modern Arab history has been betrayed.” The jihadists, the
bloodthirsty psychopaths of ISIS, “did not emerge from nowhere.
They climbed out of a rotting, empty hulk — what was left of a broken-down
civilization.” Melhem then comes to a grim realization: “There is no evidence whatever that Islam in its various political forms is compatible with modern democracy.”Walter Russell Mead writes:

At
bottom, we are witnessing the consequences of a civilization’s failure either
to overcome or to accommodate the forces of modernity. One hundred years after
the fall of the Ottoman Empire and 50 years after the French left Algeria, the
Middle East has failed to build economies that allow ordinary people to live
with dignity, has failed to build modern political institutions and has failed
to carve out the place of honor and respect in world affairs that its peoples
seek.

Israeli journalist Ari Shavit adds to this the role played by Edward Said and his postcolonialist disciples in stifling any honest discussion of the crisis of Arab civilization:

The
third reason for the Arab humanitarian disaster is political correctness.
Professor Edward Said and his students caused indescribable damage to the
ability to think or speak the truth when it comes to the Arab world. Their
wacky intellectual legacy did not permit talking about the region’s residents
as anything but victims. The grand Arab nation – with its rich history,
profound culture and considerable economic power – was treated like a juvenile
who isn’t responsible for his actions. So all the ills of Arab politics were
attributed to others – imperialists, colonialists, Zionists. So no real
criticism of the Arab world was permitted and no one demanded it mend itself.

A
culture of blame prevents moral, social and political progress. This is a
self-help universe. The nonsensical Arab insistence that all Arab problems are
the fault of America and Israel (or the Crusades) ignores the fact that Arab
civilization has been in decline for 700 years – and has been in utter disarray
for the last 200.

This is
a homemade failure. Through their own choices, cherished beliefs, values and
norms, Arabs have condemned themselves to strategic incompetence. No society that
oppresses women, denies advancement on merit even to men, indulges in fantastic
hypocrisy, wallows in corruption, undervalues secular learning, reduces its god
to a nasty disciplinarian and comforts itself with conspiracy theories will
ever compete with us. . . .

Arab
terrorism isn’t about redressing wrongs. It’s about revenge on a successful
civilization that left the dungeon-cultures of the Middle East in the dust.

The bottom line is that until the Arab
Muslim world undergoes a political, cultural, and moral transformation – an Islamic Enlightenment, a “transformation of hearts and minds” in President Obama’s words, a Second
Arab Awakening as former Jordanian foreign minister Marwan Muasher calls it, which may just be in its embryonic stages with the Arab Spring (despite all evidence to the contrary) – that produces tolerant, liberal and pluralistic societies that respect human rights and minority rights, including the right of the Jewish people to self determination, all
talk of peace between Israel and a “secular democratic Palestine” as well as a resolution to the larger conflict between the West and radical Islam, is a delusion.Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and dissident writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali have each called for a reformation in Islam. Such a reformation must, at the very least, purge the concept of jihad from the Islamic faith, or redefine it as an internal spiritual struggle instead of a holy war against the infidels. But Shadi Hamid makes a compelling argument that the Islamic world is unlikely to follow the Western path to secular liberal democracy. “Islam is distinctive in how it relates to politics – and this distinctiveness can be traced back to the religion’s founding moment in the seventh century. Islam is different.” Religion, law, and governance in Islam are woven together into a single fabric. Sharia law, which for fourteen centuries was the only law in Islamic polities, pervades all aspects of life. In Christianity there was “no equivalent of Islamic law– an accumulated corpus of law concerned with governance and the regulation of social and political affairs.” Islamism and radical Islam are the products of the collision of Islamic exceptionalism with modernity. Large majorities of Muslims in the Middle East want Sharia to be the law of the land. This includes 89% of Palestinians. Political analyst Ying Ma notes that the lines between radical Islam and mainstream Islam are not all that clear. What this means for the future of non-Muslim minorities in the dar al-Islam Hamid doesn’t say. It certainly supports Benny Morris’s dim view of the prospects for a secular democratic Palestine.Michael Mandelbaum concludes: “If the Bush democracy initiative had demonstrated that the United States could not implant democratic government in the Arab Middle East, the Arab Spring showed that the Arabs themselves could not do so, either. The local political culture proved resistant to liberty and popular sovereignty.”And while Fareed Zakaria writes that Tunisia’s recent history suggests “that there is nothing in Islam or Arab society that makes it impossible for democracy to take root,”with the rise of the genocidal ISIS caliphate in the ruins of Syria and Iraq that day looks distant indeed.

The revenge of a failed civilization. ISIS jihadist Mohammed Emwazi, “Jihadi John,” prepares to behead American journalist James Foley.

It would be a wonderful thing if, as the prophet Isaiah envisioned, the
wolf could live with the lamb, and Israelis and Palestinians could sing Kumbaya
together in a binational state. I would love nothing more than for Jews and
Arabs to make love and not war. But that is not the world we are living in. In
the real world any national community that wants to survive and be the master
of its destiny needs the political and military might provided by its own
sovereign state.

Walter Russell Mead concludes that the
failure of the traditional dhimmi survival
strategies of accommodation and submission leaves the Middle East’s beleaguered
minorities with only three choices in the face of the Islamist onslaught:
they can flee for their lives, wait to be massacred, or they can “fort
up” and create their own enclaves with military forces capable of
defeating their enemies. Israeli Jews have proven to be the most successful of
the Middle East’s minorities at “forting up.” And history has shown that
only those ethnic and religious groups able to “fort up” will
survive. Prime Minister Netanyahu acknowledged this grim reality when he told the Knesset that Israel “will forever live
by the sword.” “Without the protection of the Israel Defense Forces,”
Jonathan Tobin points out,

Jews in
Arab territory haven’t a chance. That’s a basic fact of life in the country
that predates Israel’s birth. Without self-defense forces, Jewish settlers in
those lands inside the pre-June 1967 borders were exposed to relentless
harassment, terrorism, and even pogroms. And there is no reason to believe the
situation would be any different in a future West Bank state where the
Palestinian population has been educated for decades to believe Jews have no
right to live in any part of the country.

One of
the most difficult moments in the Jewish collective memory is the knowledge
that when they came to murder us all, no one came to the rescue. That’s the
reason Israel was founded, and the reason we’ll never leave our fate in the
hands of others.

History has shown that the people of
Israel must hold on to the tools of statehood and the instruments of war in a
world still governed by the aggressive use of force. The tragic fate of the Yazidis and Assyrian Christians at the hands of ISIS is a dire
warning of the price of powerlessness in the Muslim Middle East. Indeed the
IDF’s strength and proven ability to fight an effective guerrilla war is such,
that the only nation in the world that ISIS truly fears is Israel.(Update: See this new National Interest article by strategic analyst Graham Allison: “Why ISIS Fears Israel.”)